Musical stars? Phoning the afterlife? The goofy ideas of history’s geniuses

Edison’s Ghosts: The Untold Weirdness of History’s Greatest Geniuses by Katie Spalding; Little, Brown

The idea behind the informative and entertaining Edison’s Ghosts is simple: “The flip side of ‘everyone is brilliant in their own way’ is the equally true ‘everyone is an idiot,’ and that seems to be particularly true when we talk about the people traditionally held up as geniuses.”

Author Katie Spalding’s geniuses are mainly scientists, but others, as well. While they are largely known to typical readers — Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie and Maya Angelou — she includes such obscure phenoms as Évariste Galois, who, while a teen, solved a 350-year-old math problem that laid the foundation for group theory.

No, I don’t know what that is. But Spalding describes his and others’ achievements with a light touch and sense of humour, making what could have been dry recitations of accomplishments interesting and fun.

Many of the chapters are about people whose behaviour really isn’t all that weird: Charles Darwin ate strange food, sure, but he was on a fiveyear voyage and had to consume what he could capture. Karl Marx drank to excess. Benjamin Franklin was a prankster.

But then there is Pythagoras, the triangle guy (although Spalding suggests he may not deserve credit for that idea). Not much is known about his life, but Spalding writes “he must have had just ridiculous levels of charisma, since there’s simply no way any normal person could get away with” the stuff he pulled. Among the ideas he advanced is that stars are musical and the only reason we don’t notice is that we’re used to their constant noise.

Or Thomas Edison, who developed a spirit phone, “an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” Or Arthur Conan Doyle, who believed in fairies.

Let us not forget Isaac Newton, who put pins in his eyes as part of an experiment, an act that becomes more understandable when you consider that science in his time was “in its infancy, and like all infants, that meant it was basically crawling around in the dirt sticking [stuff] in its mouth.”

Until now I thought “enjoyable science book” was an oxymoron. Spalding proved me wrong. I learned a lot and had fun doing it. Turns out a spoonful of snark helps the factoids go down — in a most delightful way.